Commie lib here: because the GOP's tax cut proposals always amount to massive cuts for their hyper-rich campaign donors, coupled with a fig-leaf of minor tax savings for everyone else, followed one year later by the inevitable budget crunch

that then impacts the quality of life of everyone except those who can afford to seal themselves away from society. It's a grift -- everyone but the GOP's campaign funders end up poorer afterwards.

The first killer app for the Apple watch will be two-way Morse-code base communication using the buzzer, for discreet Googling of the answers during tests. (of course, mastering this technique will actually require more work than just learning the test material, but that won't stop anybody)

Apparently Apple agrees with you, as they are not selling it yet.

That may be so, but let's not rule out the "something I can wear just to get more attention from the people I want more attention from" application. That application has sold lots of other types of jewelry for centuries, and much of that other jewelry costs a good bit more AND doesn't put a realistic animated butterfly flapping its wings and changing colors on your wrist.

Sometimes it does. I see a lot of buses driving around 90+% empty.

Ah, you're thinking of LOGO. It isn't widely used anymore, except as a niche language for cruise missile guidance systems.

Eh, the idea was that once the Iraqis had built up their own dam, slightly downstream from the US-built temporary dam, that we could remove the US dam and let the Iraqi dam take over.

Unfortunately, it looks like the Iraqi dam was made out of paper-mache... :(

The problem with the VA is that it had to handle a large influx of veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, and there was no corresponding influx of resources to handle them. I don't know if the VA model was 'ideal' or not, but any system will hit the wall at some point if you keep increasing the load factor and never increase its resources.

I'm probably missing the point, but isn't NDN just a way to do content-addressable lookup of data? And if so, why would we need to throw out IPv4 in order to use it? We already have lots of examples of that running over IPv4 (e.g. BitTorrent, or Akamai, or even Google-searches if you squint).

Is there some particular quality of an "automated driving system" that will make it signficantly more reliable than a home computer? I'm sure the auto manufacturers will try their best to avoid bugs, but then again Apple and Microsoft also try their best.

No worries -- to handle those scenarios, we'll download the app and steer the car using our phone. Bluetooth FTW!

... and a hacked prosthetic arm is the worst possible kind of security breach -- the hackers could literally hold your neck for ransom.

There are, but the feature doesn't work as a theft deterrent unless almost everybody has it. If only a few people have it, thieves will steal phones anyway, because the likelihood is they can resell most of the phones they steal. If/when we get to the point where almost all phones auto-brick after they are stolen, cell-phone thieves will lose their profit incentive and move on to something else.

Just wanted to say that if you are careful to use a smart-pointer class (e.g. shared_ptr) rather than raw C-style pointers to hold dynamically allocated objects, 99% of your memory leaks (and other object-lifetime-managment related problems) will "magically" go away -- and without the overhead or random execution-pauses seen in languages that rely on a garbage collector.

YOU MANIACS! YOU BLEW IT UP! OH, DAMN YOU! GODDAMN YOU ALL TO HELL!

(this text brought to you by the Lameness filter, which wishes to remind you that using too many caps is like yelling)

Really, you're don't see the difference in added risk between (a computer taking over sole responsibility for the control of a 2500-pound, 65-mile-an-hour car, in all possible traffic conditions), and (adding a strip of reinforced fabric to the cockpit)?

When was the last time your seat belt stopped working due to a buffer overrun? Contrariwise, when was the last time your home computer did something wrong or unexpected?